For those who are home, and for those who are on the way. For those who support the historic and just return of the land of Israel to its people, forever loyal to their inheritance, and its restoration.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

...So why did the New York Times choose this particular photo to accompany the story? Unfortunately we probably know the answer.

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
30 May '16..

It’s very difficult for non-Israelis to fully understand the role of the army in Israeli society. Given the security threats that Israel has faced throughout its history and continues to face, the centrality of the IDF to the lives of Israelis is understandable.

The New York Times attempts explain recent developments in Israel that have created perceived gaps between the military and the political echelons. Here’s one of the accompanying photos:

What exactly is the message of the photo? Well that depends on whether you are familiar with Israeli culture, which most New York Times readers are not.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

It is a tragedy for Israel that the generals have allowed the Left to use them in this way. Their role in perpetuating Israel’s destructive adherence to the devastating two-state policy model diminishes their past contributions and endangers Israel’s future.

The Israeli left is a one trick pony. As it sees things, all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with Europe and with the American Left – can be solved by giving up Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem (along with Gaza which we gave up already).

Once Israel does this, the Left insists, then the Palestinians, the Arab world, Europe and Bernie Sanders voters will love us as they’ve never loved us before.

The events of the past quarter century have shown the Left’s position to be entirely wrong. Every time Israel has given the Palestinians land, it has become less secure. The Arabs have become more hostile.

The West has become more hostile. The Palestinians have expanded their demands.

Because of their negative experience with the Left’s policy, most Israelis reject it. This is why the Right keeps winning elections.

Given the failure of its plan, the Left could have been expected to abandon it and strike out on a different course. But it didn’t. Instead it has tried to hide its continued allegiance to its failed withdrawal strategy by pretending it is something else.

A central component of the Left’s concealment strategy is its use of former generals.

Over the past quarter century, and particularly since the Palestinians began demonstrating in 2000 that they have no interest in a state living side by side with Israel, the Left has carted out retired generals at regular intervals to proclaim that continued allegiance to the Left’s failed policy of withdrawal is not irrational.

Every couple of years, a new initiative of former generals – often funded by the EU – is published.

Each in turn uses whatever the popular memes of the day may be to repackage their call for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and the partition of Jerusalem.

The media, itself dominated by the Left, backs these initiatives. The retired war heroes are paraded before the cameras and presented to the public as responsible adults who have grudgingly entered the political fray, despite their aversion to it, because of their patriotism. Just as they heeded the call of duty and led forces in wars of earlier generations, so today, we are told, they heed the call again, in yet another last-ditch effort to save the country.

Just in time for Avigdor Liberman’s swearing in as defense minister, a new group of old generals released a new version of their old, discredited plan.

...A quarter-century later, after thousands of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, Molotov cocktails, rockets, and mortars, only a tiny minority of Israelis still espouse the peace ideology. The fact that some American Jews—calling themselves “Zionists”—show brazen contempt for the Israeli majority means that they themselves deserve nothing but contempt.

A group of prominent American Jews, in tandem with a group of retired, left-wing Israeli military and security officials and an American security think tank, is seeking—via the next U.S. president, whoever he or she will be—to force policies on Israel that its government and a large majority of its population oppose.

In a rare and sharp split with Israeli government policy, a group of Jewish community leaders wants to get a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the next president’s desk….

Elements of the proposals…are radical departures from the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government…. Tactically, getting the next president to kick-start new talks is also anathema to Netanyahu, who regards outside pressure as counterproductive.

Kampeas explains that the organization behind this initiative, the Israel Policy Forum,

was established in the early 1990s at the behest of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who went over the head of what was then a hawkish pro-Israel establishment to seek U.S. Jewish backing for his peace talks with the Palestinians.

In other words, Rabin made that move during the early euphoria over achieving “peace” with Yasser Arafat and his PLO. From that point until Arafat’s death in 2004, well over a thousand Israelis were killed in unprecedented waves of terror attacks.

“This time, however,” Kampeas notes,

the party doing the reaching over is not the Israeli prime minister but Jewish community heavyweights who have helmed major Jewish organizations….

In the last 18 months or so, the Israel Policy Forum has signed to its board Alan Solow and Robert Sugarman, past chairmen of the Presidents Conference, the Jewish community’s foreign policy umbrella group.

Solow is also, Kampeas says, “probably the Jewish leader who has been closest to President Barack Obama.”

Kampeas identifies three other American Jewish leaders who have joined the endeavor, then reports:

The initiative will formally launch at a conference here [in Washington] on May 31, showcasing proposals for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from veterans of the Israeli and American diplomatic establishments—represented by Commanders for Israel’s Security and the Center for a New American Security, respectively.

Mainstream Jewish groups have long been resistant to openly challenging Israel on security issues. Solow said that was less of a consideration in Israel’s volatile political climate.

“One doesn’t know what Israel’s government is going to look like in a week,” he said….

“Taking on the perspective from those in the pro-Israel community, the only reasonable Zionist solution is to have two states for two people[s],” Solow said.

In addition to “getting their proposal on the next president’s desk,” the revamped Israel Policy Forum is “planning private and public representations for Jewish community leaders and members of Congress.”

...But the major factor - the one that, year after year, delivers barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust directly into the veins of Arab children, the one that instills life-changing attitudes - is education. Which is why we want to point out, in the wake of the Jabel Mukaber murder bust revealed this morning, that every single one of the sweet-faced Arab schoolchildren being educated in UNRWA schools and interviewed in the simply-shocking video we mentioned above, lives in Jerusalem where we do, and is educated here.

Palestinian Arab girls being educated UN-style in an UNRWA school in Jerusalem [Image Source]

Released for publication this morning (Monday), Israel Police have cracked the stabbing attack that took place in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighbourhood on the evening of Remembrance Day, May 10, 2016. Here's part of what we wrote about it at the time:

The victims, according to Haaretz, are a pair of "elderly women", reported to be "aged in their 70s"who "had gone for a walk in the neighborhood, also known as East Talpiot, on Tuesday morning when they were attacked by two masked individuals." Their injuries would be serious enough for younger, more robust people but they sound quite worrying, knowing what we know of their ages: "One of the women sustained stab wounds to her limbs and upper body, while the other sustained wounds to her upper body." Ynet reports that they described their attackers as two masked Palestinians wearing jeans and black shirts. The two women, described by hospital staff in the Ynet report as aged 86 and 80, were walking with three other friends when they were attacked from behind. This is frequently how "resistance" operations are done, reflecting on the inherent courage required by such acts. [From our blog post "10-May-16: Practitioners of "resistance" inflict serious stabbing injuries on two elderly Jerusalem women"]

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

Indeed, the idea that it’s acceptable to shoot at Jews – indeed, also to try to stab them, burn them with firebombs and blow them up on buses – is encouraged when we hunker down and defend ourselves while not seriously striking back.

When I was about 12 years old, I got into one of those schoolyard fistfights. Surrounded by a circle of boys cheering us on and hoping for as much blood as possible before a teacher noticed, we threw relatively ineffective punches at each other. I don’t recall many details but I do recall my strategic cowardice: I was afraid to punch the other boy in the face. I fought defensively and punched at his body. Even 60 years later, I’m embarrassed: I was thinking I don’t want to make him really mad.

My opponent was a bully and there would be other fights. The correct strategy would have been to teach him a lesson he would not forget. What was I afraid of? I was already fighting.

Israel’s situation is not exactly parallel, but it’s close. We aren’t afraid of our enemies, but we hold back because we don’t want to make our allies mad.

In the very early morning hours of October 6, 1973 when, after a disastrous string of intelligence failures, it became clear that war with Egypt and Syria was about to break out, Golda Meir finally authorized calling up the reserves. She considered a preemptive strike as well, but decided against it:

In recounting the events of the morning of October 6, Meir told the [Agranat] commission that her “heart was very much drawn to” a preemptive strike, “but I am scared.” In both the cabinet meeting on the morning of Yom Kippur and in previous meetings with Dayan and chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. David Elazar, she testified to having said: “1973 is not 1967, and this time we will not be forgiven, and we will not receive assistance when we have the need for it.”

Had Israel fired the first shot of the war, Meir testified, the US would have claimed “you started” and, based on her knowledge of the Pentagon, she continued, “I can say with 100 percent (certainty)” that the airlift of arms and supplies would not have been delivered.

Meir was deterred by Kissinger’s warnings not to preempt. But in any event, the US did not begin to airlift supplies to Israel until Israel’s Ambassador Simcha Dinitz hinted on October 9 that if things got any worse, Israel would be forced to use nuclear weapons.

Today we have allowed Hezbollah to create a massive missile array, embedded in civilian areas, with more long-range and accurate missiles than it had before the war of 2006. We have allowed Hamas to reconstruct the tunnels that posed such a threat in 2014, and replenish their stock of rockets (and Hezbollah is digging tunnels too). While the IDF has operated on numerous occasions to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining “game-changing” weapons from Iran via Syria, it has nevertheless upgraded its offensive and defensive capabilities greatly since 2006.

Israel has been deterred from preemptively attacking, first by US diplomatic pressure and later by the amount of damage to our home front that Hezbollah and Hamas could do at this point.

Israel is preparing itself to absorb the blow that it expects will characterize the beginning of the next war. This week there will be an exercise of the Home Front Command (what they used to call “Civil Defense” in the US) to simulate the evacuation of 25,000 people from the North and South which will be under rocket attack (and possibly tunnel-borne ground attack) from Hezbollah and Hamas.

The IDF is also procuring more Iron Dome short-range antimissile systems, as well as the longer-range Arrow and David’s Sling systems.

What’s wrong with this picture? Of course we need to do these things in order to protect our citizens. But it would be wrong if we come to depend on defensive weapons instead of offensive strategy.

Monday, May 30, 2016

...Trouble is, what the UN agency in question is doing in relation to peace is the exact opposite of seeking peace or making peace happen. It may, in fact, be the single most effective organization in the world for ensuring the death and misery on both sides of the Arab conflict with Israel continue.

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
30 May '16..

Someone ought to send a Whatsapp to the diplomats who deliver high-sounding pronouncements in those endless United Nations debates searching for peace and enhanced human dignity and refer them to the video clip below.

It's new and focuses on a UN agency that is actually doing far more in relation to peace than all those speeches put together.

Trouble is, what the UN agency in question is doing in relation to peace is the exact opposite of seeking peace or making peace happen. It may, in fact, be the single most effective organization in the world for ensuring the death and misery on both sides of the Arab conflict with Israel continue.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...Coexistence is not the issue for Christians here, but rather fear for their own existence -- based on the ruthless lack of freedom under the PA, as in all Arab states. The PA and other Arab Islamic regimes are smart enough to smell this weakness.

Rami Ayyad, a Christian bookseller in Gaza, was murdered by Islamic extremists because he refused to close his bookshop.

Shadi Khalloul..
Gatestone Institute..
30 May '16..

Christians in Holy Land, Judea and Samaria -- what today is called the West Bank or the Palestinian Authority (PA) -- are, with the Jews and assorted Arabs, the indigenous people of the land. The region has been inhabited by Jews and then Christians for nearly three thousand years; until the seventh century, Muslims did not even exist.

After the conquest of Jerusalem by Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula in 637 AD, the Jews and early followers of Christianity were forced either to convert to Islam or accept the rule of sharia (Islamic religious law) under the Islamic Caliphate, with its dhimmi laws designed to remind you that you are inferior. In Islam, dhimmis are non-Muslims -- and therefore second-class, barely tolerated residents -- who live under separate, harsher, laws and have to pay protection money (a "tax" called the jizya) to safeguard their lives and property.

These laws are imposed by Muslim conquerors against all "infidels," both Christians and Jews, in all occupied areas, and are still valid under different guises today in Gaza and in the Palestinian Authority.

In Syria, ISIS recently sent out an Islamic decree ordering Christians in Al Raqqa to pay a tax of around half an ounce (14g) of pure gold as part of these dhimmi rules, the same as in the earlier Muslim conquest of the Middle East.

In Gaza, Christians are persecuted by Islamic groups and the Hamas government. Rami Ayyad, a local Christian who owned a bookshop, was assassinated for refusing to close it.

In Bethlehem, in the West Bank, the Saint Charbel Monastery was set ablaze on October 8, 2015 and the car of the Jerusalem Latin Patriarch was attacked by Palestinian Islamic extremists last Christmas Eve. Luckily, we have Israeli soldiers at Rachel's Tomb who intervened to stop the Palestinian attackers.

Now, what was the role of the Jews in all these attacks? The answer is: nothing.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...whilst the claim from BBC Complaints that “our reporters have spoken to the families of Israelis and Palestinians killed in the recent violence” is true, BBC audiences have heard, read or seen considerably more interviews with the families of Palestinian attackers than they have from those of Israeli victims. That fact of course raises questions concerning the BBC’s adherence to its own editorial guidelines demanding “due impartiality”.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
30 May '16..

A number of readers have written to BBC Watch over the past months to inform us of the receipt of a template response to their complaints concerning the BBC’s portrayal of the surge of terror attacks against Israelis which began last September. That response from BBC Complaints – also sent in at least one case in reply to a complaint about another issue – includes the following:EG

“We appreciate you believe our coverage of this story has shown bias in favour of the Palestinians and against Israelis and the state of Israel. In this response we hope to explain why we feel this has not been the case.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...Could you imagine the outrage if Israel was caught using just a single fake or distorted photo? On second thought, there's no need to imagine. Media outlets including Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The International Business Times and Times of Israel covered the 2013 case in which the Israeli army's English blog posted a photograph misidentifying a Malaysian mall as located in Gaza. Will those same outlets now cover the Palestinian Ministry of Health's use of several egregiously mislabeled and even photoshopped images in an official submission to the World Health Organization?

Tamar Sternthal..
CAMERA Snapshots..
29 May '16..

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision last week harshly critical of Israel for "Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan" prompted Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid to describe it as antisemitic.

In preparation for WHO's publication of the decision, the Palestinian Ministry of Health submitted a report to the international organization. Apart from the usual allegations propagated by various NGOs, the official Palestinian submission also includes the following outrageous charges:

• Israel is damaging prisoners' health by "Holding prisoners in polluted areas, such as in the vicinity of the Dimona reactor or near areas in which waste from that reactor has been buried" (page 29).

• "In April 2013 the Russian newspaper Pravda accused Israel of injecting a number of Palestinian prisoners who were approaching their release date with cancer-causing viruses. Despite Israel’s rejection of the accusations made by the newspaper, the question remains: is it true that Israel is injecting prisoners with viruses?" (page 29)

• A Palestinian doctor contends that the Israeli practice of freezing terrorists' bodies and insistence that they will only be returned to Palestinians if they are buried immediately "makes it impossible to ascertain whether the deceased individual’s organs have been stolen" (page 49).

Beyond the unfounded, vitriolic allegations, the pictures appearing in the Palestinian Health Ministry's report highlight the submission’s total lack of credibility. Here are some examples:

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

Why are the parents of a teenage girl murdered by a fanatical agent of jihad the only voices being heard exposing and decrying this appalling state of affairs?

Allies and partners in defeating the jihadists:
Abdullah II and Obama [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
29 May '16..

With the sale of one of the world's major repositories of news photographs recently, it has suddenly gotten a lot harder (we discovered just today) to locate many archived images of news events from the recent past.

This is relevant to us. We are passionate about wanting people to be aware of some of the less-well-publicized aspects of terrorism and what it means when it's done to you.

Three news photos were published in October 2011 that recorded an event connected indirectly to our lives but basically unknown to almost anyone else.

The chief engineer of our daughter's murder, sentenced a few years before to sixteen terms of life imprisonment, was set free by Israel in October 2011. A day later, she arrived in another country where most of her family had lived since before she was born (and still lives) and where she herself was born. There she was greeted with pomp, ceremony and emotion at an official reception in the Family Court of that country, located in its capital city.

People who know the Middle East and the ins and outs of terrorism probably don't know an of this, and perhaps don't care. The photos recording the reception in the court building may be the only evidence that it happened. And with the sale to a Chinese firm of the photo archive that housed them, that evidence is now hard to find.

Before we go into the background, we have just posted those pictures at the foot of this article. We have mentioned them numerous times in this blog. We want them to be seen. People need to appreciate the painful and damaging double-talk that is part of the global conversation about terrorism.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

...The IDF is grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. It's us, it's all of us, it's "our forces." But recently, something happened there, within our forces' upper command echelon. A kind of "group think" effect that yielded a new filter, through which they now view reality. It involves a communal pat on the back and a deep-seated belief that they, and only they, hold the philosopher's stone of truth and justice, and, above all, values. But that is entirely not the case. A sense of proportion and good judgement are sorely lacking there.

"Our forces" is what we call IDF soldiers and commanders. And that is precisely what we should call them, because ever since the establishment of the state, our army has been the key force that protects Israel, and there is really nothing quite like it. Ever since 1948 and the founding generation, through all the wars Israel has fought and the struggle to defend our borders, we have relied upon a military comprising soldiers in compulsory service and reservists. The IDF is grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. It's us, it's all of us, it's "our forces."

But recently, something happened there, within our forces' upper command echelon. A kind of "group think" effect that yielded a new filter, through which they now view reality. It involves a communal pat on the back and a deep-seated belief that they, and only they, hold the philosopher's stone of truth and justice, and, above all, values. But that is entirely not the case. A sense of proportion and good judgement are sorely lacking there.

About a month ago, the U.S. military published an inquiry into a failed military operation in Afghanistan. In October 2015, a special airplane -- a Hercules gunship that had been customized for anti-terror missions -- attacked a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz. The ground forces were convinced that the hospital was actually a Taliban base. The airstrike was launched and 42 civilians were killed: women, children and the elderly.

Exactly 12 minutes into the strike, Doctors Without Borders contacted the American Special Forces commander to alert him of the mistake, but the airstrike continued for another 30 to 50 minutes, by various accounts, after the call was received.

Following a long investigation, the report was published. The strike does not constitute a war crime, it determined. Not murder, not manslaughter, not negligence. It was an operational mistake: The intended target was another building.

The target was misidentified; the protocol was wrong; there was a malfunction in the plane's control system; there was a communications error. Were 42 civilians killed? Were there urgent appeals in real-time to hold fire? Oh well. It was an accident.

No one in the U.S. military will face court-martial, but 16 people were reprimanded. Some will be dismissed from their posts. Disciplinary action was taken. End of story.

So what, the American military isn't "moral"? Of course it's moral. The "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," the official guide for the Army and the Marines, says: "American military values obligate Soldiers and Marines to accomplish their missions while taking measures to limit the destruction caused during military operations, particularly in terms of collateral harm to noncombatants. ... Combatants are not required to take so much risk that they fail in their mission or forfeit their lives."

And after all that, the matter ended -- with a few people being reprimanded.

And here? The case of Elor Azaria, the IDF soldier who shot an incapacitated terrorist in Hebron in March, has become a test case in the eyes of senior officers, a watershed event, a major battle for the values of purity of arms, and what's worse -- an engine of accusations against Israeli society as a whole.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...The problems of the Palestinians are real and tragic, and when abuses against innocent Palestinians occur, including by Israelis, they should be condemned. But the entire situation in which that suffering arises is by now, after decades of spurning offers and deals that Israel was willing to accept, in essence, a creation of the Palestinian leadership. They have brought this misery upon themselves by refusing to compromise and accept the existence of a Jewish state. And the best thing that those who profess to care about the Palestinian cause could do is to speak honestly to the Palestinians about their leaders’ role in their plight.

I want to add to Jonathan Tobin’s excellent post about the Democratic Party’s move away from support for Israel, which is, in turn, a result of the party’s lurch to the Left.

As the New York Times puts it in its story, “A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”

What triggered this attention is the appointment of two anti-Israel figures on the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, who on Wednesday “denounced Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government.”

These appointments laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians — the most since 2001 — while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

What explains this troubling trend? A friend of mine puts it this way: The Left thinks in terms of oppressor and oppressed, and in those terms it’s much easier for them to see the Palestinians as the oppressed than the Israelis, and arguments about who is at fault or who refuses to come to the table don’t change the basic power relations of a powerful, wealthy, successful society facing a weak, poor, failed one. It suggests the Left’s entire oppressor/oppressed framework often is misguided, but that’s just how liberals tend to think.

What’s wrong with this progressive construct is that it is morally offensive and empirically insane. One can sympathize with the suffering of individual Palestinians while also recognizing that Palestinians, not Israel, have brought these miseries upon themselves.

To quickly review the historical record: For those who blame the so-called “Israeli occupation” for Palestinian hostilities, it needs to be pointed out yet again that the PLO, an organization committed to the destruction of Israel, was founded in 1964, three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. The entire Palestinian movement, from its inception to this day, is based on vanquishing the Jewish state.

...The Obama Administration’s program to extricate itself from the Middle East by empowering Iran as the new regional power has given a new impetus to the policy of shrinking Israel. Iran sees Israel as a major obstacle to its hegemony, for both geopolitical and religious/ideological reasons, and is committed to eliminating the Jewish state. Obama found it necessary to restrain Israel from bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities at least once (in 2012), and seems to be prepared to sacrifice Israel in order to achieve his goal of establishing Iranian regional dominance.

Old realpolitiker Henry Kissinger was in the news recently when he sat down with Donald Trump, to give him the benefit of his experience. It brought to mind Kissinger’s numerous attempts to get Israel out of the territories it conquered in 1967, before, during and – especially – after the Yom Kippur War.

Kissinger went to Iraq in December of 1975 to try to wean the regime away from the Soviet Union and improve relations with the US. In a discussion with Sa’dun Hammadi, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Kissinger suggested that American support for Israel was a result of Jewish political and financial power, promised that the US would work to force Israel back to pre-1967 boundaries, and indicated that while the US would not support the elimination of Israel, he believed that its existence was only temporary. Here is an excerpt (the whole thing is worth reading):

I think, when we look at history, that when Israel was created in 1948, I don’t think anyone understood it. It originated in American domestic politics. It was far away and little understood. So it was not an American design to get a bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less complicated. And I would say that until 1973, the Jewish community had enormous influence. It is only in the last two years, as a result of the policy we are pursuing, that it has changed.We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world. You yourself said your objection to us is Israel. Except maybe that we are capitalists. We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions. I don’t agree that Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won’t develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years, Israel will be like Lebanon—struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world. [my emphasis] …

Kissinger also promised that aid to Israel, which he presented as a result of Jewish political influence, would be significantly reduced. He indicated that legal changes in the US – he must have been referring to the creation of the Federal Electoral Commission in 1974 to regulate campaign contributions – would attenuate Jewish power and therefore American support for Israel. Naturally, he didn’t foresee the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, which permanently established a high level of military aid to both countries.

He further promised that the US would support a PLO-run Palestinian state if the PLO would accept UNSC resolution 242 and recognize Israel. This of course is what (supposedly) happened in the Oslo accords.

Kissinger insisted that “No one is in favor of Israel’s destruction—I won’t mislead you—nor am I.” But his hint that a smaller Israel might not survive is clear. Surely he understood that a pre-1967-sized Israel (within what Eban called “Auschwitz lines”) would have no chance of surviving, simply because of the strategic geography of the area.

Kissinger was wrong about the Arabs developing the capability to challenge Israel, but their place has been taken by soon-to-be-nuclear Iran and its proxies, who are significantly more dangerous than the Arab states ever were.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

...With the traditional Arab regimes still in place fighting for their survival, and Iran ascendant, Israel needs to assume that more terrorist regimes like Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas will be formed from the wreckage of the Arab state system in the future. Instability, then, can be expected to remain a chronic condition of the Arab world. The good news is that Israel has the capacity to adapt and forge constructive strategies for weakening and dividing our enemies. The bad news is that so long as we insist on obsessing over ourselves, we are unlikely to do so.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
27 May '16..

Last week, a mob of 300 Muslim men in southern Egypt stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked and paraded her through the streets.

This Islamist atrocity came a few days before an EgyptAir flight from Paris exploded in the skies near Alexandria. It was the second passenger jet bombed by jihadists in Egypt in recent months.

Egypt is hanging on by a thread. Like the attack that downed a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last October, this week’s attack is likely the work of an Egyptian airport employee. It is yet more proof that nearly three years after the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist government, the Brotherhood’s supporters remain seeded throughout the country and are capable of threatening the regime and the very survival of the Egyptian state.

It isn’t in the least surprising that Islamists have this power. Most Egyptians support them.

In the parliamentary elections four-and-a-half years ago, Islamists won more than 65 percent of the vote. Those were the most open elections in Egyptian history.

Given their strength, it is far from certain that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will long succeed in preventing the most powerful and populous country in the Arab world from becoming another branch of Islamic State.

From Israel’s perspective, how this battle pans out is of pivotal importance. But you wouldn’t know it from the media – or from our national security leaders.

As far as they are concerned, the gravest threat facing Israel is the Israeli Right. From their perspective, the most significant development of the year was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Avigdor Lieberman to replace Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister.

Consider for example a recent national security program on Army Radio.

On Tuesday veteran Arab affairs correspondent Avi Issacharof hosted Egyptian journalist Munib Muhamed on his radio show. Since the show was broadcast two days after the EgyptAir attack, Issacharof might have been expected to ask Muhamed about the bombing.

But then Israel wouldn’t have been the story. Instead, Issacharof asked Muhamed what Egyptians think of Lieberman. And again, there was nothing out of the ordinary in his discussion topic.

As the states around us collapse or struggle to survive, our media and our security brass spend the better part of their time telling us that Israeli society is dangerous. Our democracy is in danger. We are dangerous people. And we are making our neighbors angry.

As our elites obsess over Netanyahu’s coalition building and demand that the rest of the world obsess with them, we spend precious little time thinking about the long-term strategic implications of the revolutionary changes happening all around us.

...The AP story paints a picture that Israel is exclusively responsible for war and suffering in Gaza, that Palestinians bear no responsibility for pursuing peace, and that Hamas…simply does not exist. We think news audiences deserve better.

Daniel Pomerantz..
Honest Reporting..
26 May '16..

The Associated Press, one of the largest news agencies in the world, wrote a short article about Gaza, just 309 words. Not a single one of those words was “Hamas.”

That’s like talking about Syria and not using the words “Islamic State” (ISIS) or talking about the September 11 attacks and not mentioning “Al Qaeda.” It’s more than surreal, it’s bad journalism.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

Friday, May 27, 2016

The crippling unemployment in Gaza, reportedly above 40%, will not be alleviated by transferring Israeli supervision from Ashdod and the Gaza border crossings to an offshore islet. There is soaring unemployment because any creative energies that might exist in Gaza are not being channeled toward productive or constructive goals, but rather into fomenting violence against the despised "Zionist entity." A port will not change those realities. Indeed, it is likely to exacerbate them.

Martin Sherman..
Israel Hayom..
27 May '16..

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.- Attributed to Albert Einstein

Just when you thought that you could not possibly hear anything more preposterous on how to help resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, somehow someone always manages to prove you wrong by coming out with a policy proposal so glaringly absurd that it transcends what you mistakenly believed was the pinnacle of imbecility.

Harebrained and hazardous

Disturbingly, precisely such a hopelessly hare-brained scheme is now being repeatedly bandied about by Israelis in positions of influence.

The idea is to provide Gaza with what, in effect, will be a detachable civilian port, under Israeli supervision. It is to be built on an offshore artificial island, connected to the mainland by a bridge over 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long, which, according to its proponents, can easily be disconnected should the Gazans "misbehave."

Actually, this nonsensical notion has been around for quite some time. Indeed, as early as 2011, British daily The Guardian reported that Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz was pursuing the idea, which he estimated would cost $10 billion and take about a decade to complete.

Lately, however, it has been raised with increasing frequency in the media, and publicly endorsed by both government ministers and senior IDF brass.

Thus, earlier this year, Construction Minister Yoav Gallant, formerly the head of the IDF Southern Command, expressed his support for the idea in an interview with Bloomberg.

Just prior to that, Haaretz reported that "senior Israel Defense Forces officers are in favor in principle of a port for the Gaza Strip," and just last week The Jerusalem Post wrote: "High up within the defense establishment, some believe that the time has come for Israel to set up a civilian seaport for the Gaza Strip."

Detachable port? Detached from reality!

Indeed, at a conference held this weekend in New York, Katz, who, in addition to the transportation portfolio holds the post of intelligence minister, reiterated his previous support for a Gaza port on an artificial offshore island: "The offshore project could provide Gaza with an economic and humanitarian gateway to the world without endangering Israeli security."

I confess that the first time I heard of this appallingly absurd idea was in a private conversation several months ago with someone (who shall remain nameless) considered a serious contender for the post of Mossad director. I remember at the time being taken aback by the idea, so clearly ill-conceived and illfated, being promoted by someone so high ranking. But I took (false) comfort in the belief that it was so wildly outlandish that it would never be given serious consideration by those in authority.

As it turns out, I was sadly mistaken -- as this perilous proposal continues to enjoy sustained attention in the discourse.

...Instead of doing the right thing in regards the Temple Mount, which is to say democratize it, successive Israeli governments prefer to bow to the irrational demands of their tormentors. Instead of standing up for its own alleged values, Israel allows Muslim bigots to decide who may, or who may not, be allowed to pray on a bit of land within the ancient capital of the Jewish people.

MK Yehuda Glick

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
26 May '16..

Temple Mount activist, Yehuda Glick, was elected to the Knesset and already there are concerns about World War III.

Glick got shot up and almost murdered in 2014 for the temerity to suggest that non-Muslims - even Jews - should be allowed to pray at the holiest site of the Jewish people.

Although Israel has repeatedly reassured the Palestinians and Arab states that it will not alter the status quo at the flashpoint site, Glick is confident he will find allies in the Knesset to support his cause.And asked whether he would tone down his lobbying if asked to do so for security reasons, he said there would be “no reasoning” behind such a request and maintained: “I will continue advocating.”

I think that I am going to call the guy up and thank him for his bravery and essential human decency.

If there is one issue that genuinely pisses me off it is Israeli policy concerning the Temple Mount. How is it possible that someone like Moshe Dayan could be so naive as to think that handing over the holiest site of the Jewish people to Arabs would somehow placate them?

It did the exact opposite as should have been entirely predictable.

Instead of being grateful to the Jewish people for their generosity, the Arabs use the Temple Mount as a club and Israel allows this despite the fact that it need not do so.

They have even made it a rule that no member of the Knesset shall be allowed to go up there.

I do not know what to say. The stupidity is just breathtaking.

By preventing non-Muslims from praying on the Temple Mount Israel sends a message to the world that Jerusalem is not really a Jewish town. Maintaining the "status quo" is the same as maintaining the idea that Jerusalem actually belongs to the Arabs and, therefore, Jews are nothing more than land thieves.

...All of which proves that the good intentions of the worthy people sponsoring this “new” peace initiative are as worthless as the promises Arafat made to Rabin when the IPF first went into business. This is the kind of help that Israel doesn’t need.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
26 May '16..

When it comes to reinventing the wheel, some people just never tire of the exercise. That’s the only way to view a new Middle East peace initiative that its sponsors are touting as the proposal that the world has been waiting for that will finally solve the problem that has resisted every previous initiative. But in this case, the solution isn’t coming from unfriendly outsiders like the European Union, the United Nations, or even the Obama administration. It’s a group of American Jews who not only believe they are acting in the best interests of Israel but are pushing their ideas forward in cooperation with an organization of retired Israeli military and security officials as well as a Washington security think tank. Buoyed by the bad press that the current Israeli government has been getting, these people think now is just the moment to push forward a peace plan that will help prepare the way for change despite the opposition of the elected leaders of the Jewish state.

But even if we were to concede that their motives are pure, what they are doing is not only a waste of time, it is also actually counter-productive.

The group in question is the Israel Policy Forum, an organization supported and staffed by people with records of support for the Jewish state but which has been out of the news for a long time. Created at the behest of the late Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, the IPF’s original intent was to serve as a counterweight to AIPAC because the prime minister thought it was insufficiently enthusiastic about the Oslo Accords. Supported by heavyweight American Jewish donors, the group had a big initial splash, but its backers didn’t have the stomach to compete with the umbrella pro-Israel lobby. It was also soon outpaced by events as the Oslo process unraveled and was ultimately discredited in the eyes of the Israeli public by the deceit of Yasir Arafat and the horror of the Palestinian terrorism that he unleashed in the years that followed.

Since then, the IPF has been eclipsed among liberals by J Street, a group that didn’t shrink from seeking to support the Obama administration’s policy of pressure and more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel as well as backing an Iranian nuclear deal that was opposed by Israelis across the political spectrum from left to right. Indeed, for many on the Jewish left here even J Street isn’t radical enough since it still puts itself forward as a “pro-Israel” group and opposes the BDS movement that aims at waging economic war on the Jewish state even as it supports those who practice more selective boycotts. But the IPF has just gotten fresh blood in the form of faithful Obama loyalist, apologist and funder Alan Solow and other liberal big shots. Yet though this effort is aimed at a more mainstream audience, the IPF initiative is based on the same bogus notion that Israel needs to be saved from itself and forced to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to preserve it as a Jewish state.

...With today’s vote, which robs the world health assembly of limited time and resources in order to portray Israel as the world’s only violator of health rights—when in fact Israel is the beacon of the entire region on promoting and respecting the health rights of all people—the entire EU now descends into irrationalism. By scapegoating the Jewish state for all the world’s health problems, just as medieval Europe once accused the Jews of poisoning the wells, the EU aids and abets the UN and its World Health Organization to betray the cause of humanity and the very principles upon which they were founded.

UN Watch Briefing..
Vol. 591..
25 May '16..

GENEVA, May 25 — The UK, France, Germany and other EU states voted today for a UN resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab group of states and the Palestinian delegation, that singled out Israel at the annual assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) as the only violator of “mental, physical and environmental health,” and commissioned a WHO delegation to investigate and report on “the health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory” and in “the occupied Syrian Golan,” and to place it on the agenda again at next year’s meeting.

By contrast, the UN assembly did not address Syrian hospitals being bombed by Syrian and Russian warplanes, or millions of Yemenis denied access to food and water by the Saudi-led bombings and blockade, nor did it pass a resolution on any other country in the world. Out of 24 items on the meeting’s agenda, only one, Item No. 19 against Israel, focused on a specific country.

“The UN reached new heights of absurdity today,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, “by enacting a resolution which accuses Israel of violating the health rights of Syrians in the Golan, even as in reality Israeli hospitals continue their life-saving treatment for Syrians fleeing to the Golan from the Assad regime’s barbaric attacks.”

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

...By making an accusation of disproportionality without defining the meaning of the term, Bernie Sanders and Haaretz betrayed not only the Palestinians and the Israelis, but also their professions. They made false and unsubstantiated accusations while ignoring the thousands more deaths that the Palestinians are inflicting on their own people -- by training toddlers and children for war, using their own people as human shields and failing to provide shelters for them, as the Israelis do for their citizens.

Fred Maroun..
Gatestone Institute..
26 May '16..

As a fourth Gaza war looms on the horizon, we should be aware of the hypocrisy and demagoguery of past Gaza wars: because we are likely to see more of the same.

The Accusation

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate in the Democratic primaries for president, claimed that Israel's response in the 2014 Gaza war was "disproportionate," and Haaretz columnist Asher Schechter agreed. Yet neither Sanders nor Haaretz provided evidence to back that claim.

Schechter made one point worth mentioning: the claim of "extremely permissive rules of engagement during the operation that aimed to protect the lives of IDF soldiers even if the cost was a greater loss of civilian lives." If true, it simply means that IDF soldiers, as all soldiers, have to make split-second decisions, and when they do so in a situation when confronted with Palestinians who appear to be terrorists, they err on the side of assuming they are terrorists in order to protect their own lives. That is not unexpected, and Israel has no obligation to do otherwise.

Israel has repeatedly demonstrated how much it values the civilian lives of the people it is fighting. No other military force drops leaflets, telephones its adversaries and "knocks on the roof" to warn them of an imminent attack, so that civilians will have time to evacuate. Israel values the lives of Palestinian civilians, but naturally, it values the lives of its own soldiers more. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated how much it values its soldiers, for example when it freed more than one thousand Palestinian criminals. Why would anyone expect Israel to suddenly to value its soldiers less when forced to fight terrorism in Gaza?

What is disgraceful is not that Israel cares about its soldiers, most of whom have families at home -- in many cases dependent on them for their livelihood. What would morale in any military be if soldiers felt they were merely regarded as cannon-fodder, not cared about?

What is disgraceful is that the Palestinian government in Gaza cares less about the lives of its own civilians, who themselves have families, than about killing Jews.

Fred Maroun, a left-leaning Arab based in Canada, has authored op-eds for New Canadian Media, among other outlets. From 1961-1984, he lived in Lebanon.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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About Me

I visited Hevron in November 2000 after the outbreak of the Rosh Hashanah War to see what could be done to assist in the face of the growing daily attacks on the community. After returning to work for the community in the summer of 2001, a bond and a love was forged that grows to this day. My wife Melody and I merited to be married at Ma'arat HaMachpela and now host visitors from throughout the world every Shabbat as well as during the week. Our goal, "Time to come Home!"